The invention relates to smart cards, and in particular to smart card control of terminal and network resources.
Smart cards are used for a variety of applications including electronic game cards, identification badges, and data storage media such as electronic books. The smart cards are typically encased in a tamper-resistant, plastic or metal housing about the size of a credit card and contain one or more embedded integrated circuit devices. Terminals, such as ID verification systems and electronic video games, etc., are available with one or more smart card interfaces that permit connection of the smart card to the terminal.
In traditional systems, the terminals or terminal device accesses the smart card through standard protocols, such as the ISO 7816 protocol. These protocols usually limit the smart cards to the role of "slave", while the terminal or terminal device acts as the "master". This means that the smart card cannot initiate any action or communication, but can only respond to specific commands from the terminal. A prior art terminal typically starts in the idle state (ST11), as shown in FIG. 1. The terminal then transmits a command to the smart card (ST12), and then waits for a response (ST13). After receiving the response from the smart card (ST14), the terminal returns to the idle state (ST11). Similarly, as shown in FIG. 2, a prior art smart card begins with the smart card waiting for a command from the terminal (ST21). Upon receiving the command from the terminal (ST22), the smart card proceeds to prepare an appropriate response (ST23), transmits the response to the terminal (ST24), and returns to the wait state (ST21) to await the next command. Under the above scheme, there is no provision for the smart card to access resources controlled by the terminal.
European Patent Application Document EP-A-662 674 discloses a smart card transaction system in which the traditional master-slave relationship is reversed. EP-A-662 674 proposes a transaction processing system which consists of "master" elements that control a specific transaction and "slave" elements that respond to the master to execute the transactions. In EP-A-662 674 the master elements are arranged in the cards and the slave elements in the terminals. During the processing of a transaction, it is possible for a card operating in master mode, to go to slave mode and vice versa.